Autofill is convenient, but is it safe? A reader wants to know:
How secure is the Firefox autofill, especially for credit card info?
Honestly, in the grand scheme of things whether or not you use autofill might not make much difference. The majority of credit card and banking information is stolen from the financial institution, retail data customer databases, or voluntarily offered up the consumer through phishing attacks.
It’s always safer not to use autofill, just because someone could physically get their hands on your computer or a hacker might be able to take control of it.
However, if you have a good security program on your computer, practice good habits when using surfing the net, and using email, you lower the risk of your computer being compromised.
Truthfully, if your computer was to be compromised, a keylogger could record you typing in your credit card number even if it isn’t stored in autofill.
It’s always good to enable multi-factor authentication on your accounts. That makes it’s harder to break in.